What this reading supplies. The prompt, the four stages and the short rubric are in the lesson. What was missing was the text of the fifth speech, a four-level rubric, and a worked model of all four parts. Here you get: (1) where each of the five speeches is hosted; (2) the Douglass passages, which are not hosted anywhere else in this course except the opening of the speech in Lesson 2.4; (3) an SLS-original model of every part of the project, built on the Douglass passage so that you can check each move against text you can see; (4) the rubric at four levels. Source: Frederick Douglass, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? (delivered on Monday, 5 July 1852, and published that year as an oration delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York), text from Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=What_to_the_Slave_Is_the_Fourth_of_July%3F&action=render, retrieved 26 September 2026. Spelling and punctuation are the source’s. The models, the rewrite and the rubric are SLS original and are not Douglass’s words.

1. Where each speech is hosted

If the speech you choose is hosted in another lesson, reread it there before you start. Every quotation in your critique has to be copied from the hosted text, not from memory.

2. The Douglass passages

Passage A is the turn: the speaker has been invited to celebrate and explains why he cannot. Passage B is the direct answer to the question the whole speech asks.

Passage A: Fellow-citizens, pardon me

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.—The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

Passage B: What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

3. A worked model of all four parts (SLS original, on Passage A)

This is one way to do each part. Your speech is different, so your moves will be different; the purpose is to show the level of detail each part needs.

Part 1. Rhetorical precis (four sentences)

1. Douglass, speaking in Rochester on 5 July 1852 to an audience gathered for the Fourth of July celebration, refuses the role of grateful celebrant he has been invited to play, arguing that the holiday’s blessings belong to his listeners and not to the enslaved people he represents.
2. He opens with a chain of rhetorical questions about whether the Declaration’s principles reach him, concedes that a yes would make his task easy, then turns on the words But, such is not the state of the case. into short declarations that divide you from me, and closes the passage with the image of a man in fetters dragged into a temple of liberty.
3. His purpose is to make the audience feel the exclusion before he argues it, so that the argument that follows lands on people who have already been placed on the other side of the holiday.
4. He writes in a tone of controlled bitterness for an audience that has gathered to celebrate and has invited him to speak, treating them as citizens who can be held to their own stated principles.

Part 2. Critique: thesis, outline and one paragraph

Thesis (from precis sentence 4). Douglass turns his audience’s own holiday against them: by using the grammar of celebration to stage a refusal to celebrate, he makes the audience experience the exclusion before he argues it.

Outline, one method per paragraph (not one topic).

1. Rhetorical questions that grant the audience its premises before withdrawing them. Evidence: Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?
2. A pronoun division that puts the audience on one side of a line. Evidence: This Fourth July is yours, not mine. followed by You may rejoice, I must mourn.
3. An extended image that recasts the invitation as an insult. Evidence: To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty
4. The vulnerability paragraph, below.

Model vulnerability paragraph. The passage’s greatest risk is also its most deliberate choice. Douglass tells the people whose goodwill he needs that their invitation is inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony, and then warns them, by way of a parallel with a nation destroyed for its crimes, that they are copying a dangerous example. A speaker who wanted only applause would not do this. He is also exposed on a second front: the whole refusal depends on the audience granting that the Declaration’s principles apply to everyone, and the passage cannot force that agreement. It can only make refusing it uncomfortable. That is why the passage spends its first half asking questions instead of asserting answers. The speech is strongest where it lets the audience convict itself, and weakest for any listener who is prepared to answer the questions with a plain no.

Notice what the model does with the warning about a destroyed nation: it paraphrases and says so (“by way of a parallel”) instead of putting quotation marks around words Douglass did not use. When you paraphrase, make that visible; when you quote, copy exactly.

Part 3. Audience rewrite with three annotations

Rewrite of the last five sentences before the fetters image, for contemporary ninth graders (SLS original, about 70 words). The block below is SLS original, not Douglass, and must not be quoted as his.

The good things you celebrate today are not shared equally. Your ancestors left you a rich inheritance of fairness, freedom and success, and you enjoy it. I do not. The same sun that warmed and healed you whipped and killed me. This holiday belongs to you, not to me. You get to celebrate. I have to grieve.

Part 4. Delivery notes

Mark your script, then read it aloud. In the model rewrite, the three short closing sentences carry the emphasis, so the marks fall there:

The same sun that warmed and healed you [pause] whipped and killed me. [longer pause] This holiday belongs to you, [pause] not to me. [pause] You get to celebrate. [pause] I have to grieve. [stop; do not speed up]

Two things are assessed: the pause falls where your own sentence structure puts it, and the register is formal English suitable for an academic audience. Neither depends on performing well. If you prefer not to record, submit the marked script and deliver it once in a scheduled one-to-one session; both routes earn full credit.

4. Rubric at four levels (SLS original)

Reading a rubric row. If you are between two levels, read the higher one aloud and ask whether your work meets every clause. If one clause fails, the row is the lower level.